Mariana Matus is co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics. Her problem: How do you turn sewage into useful public health data? When she and her co-founder launched the company, wastewater epidemiology was a niche field nobody paid much attention to. The Covid pandemic changed that. Studying wastewater has become one of the most important tools for tracking the pandemic. And Mariana's company, Biobot Analytics, has become a global leader in the field, with tens of millions of dollars in annual reve...
Sep 01, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the open-source software that powers more than 40% of all the websites in the world. He's also the founder of a for-profit company called Automattic. Matt's problem is this: How do you build a multibillion-dollar company on top of software that your competitors can use for free? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Aug 25, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Mohammed Ashour is the co-founder and CEO of Aspire Food Group. The company just built the biggest cricket factory in the history of the world. His problem: How do you sell billions of bugs a year? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Aug 18, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 22
We put man on the moon before we invented the wheeled suitcase. Why did it take so long? Find out in this episode of Patented: History of Inventions, where host Dallas Campbell is joined by expert Katrine Marçal, whose research has revealed an intriguing hidden chapter in the invention story of rolling luggage. If you're interested in the stories behind the world's greatest inventions — from the mighty steam train to the humble condom - subscribe to Patented: History of Inventions , created by o...
Aug 15, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Rajiv Maheswaran is the co-founder and president of Second Spectrum. Rajiv and his company figured out how to turn raw sports data into useful information for coaches. Today, the company works with basketball and soccer teams in the NBA, the Premier League and Major League Soccer. Rajiv's problem: How do you teach a computer to understand sports? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/lis...
Aug 11, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 21
David Neeleman has founded five airlines, including JetBlue. He recently launched a new airline, called Breeze. His problem: How do you use technology to bring down the cost of airfares? He's been working on that problem for decades -- from inventing ticketless travel in the 1980s, to building a 21st century airline where customers never need to call customer service to ask for help. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to o...
Aug 04, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Bill Shufelt is the founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing Company. His problem: How do you turn non-alcoholic beer from a punchline into something people drink all the time? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 28, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 19
John Green is the author of The Fault in Our Stars and six other novels. He also co-founded a company that makes educational videos that have been viewed billions of times. John's problem: How do you make videos that actually help people make it through college? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 21, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Luana Lopes Lara is the co-founder of Kalshi, an exchange that lets ordinary people bet on everything from the path of inflation to what bills Congress will pass by the end of the year. Her problem: How to you build a market like the New York Stock Exchange that lets people bet on real-world events? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 14, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 17
A special preview of the podcast, Unsung Science with David Pogue from CBS News. Journalist and author David Pogue finds the untold creation stories behind the most mind-blowing advances in science and tech—and hears from the characters involved—from their first inspiration to the times they almost gave up. This episode looks at the bad guys who used software bots to sign up for millions of fake email accounts—for sending out spam. Then, PhD student Luis Von Ahn stopped them. He invented the CAP...
Jul 13, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Shimon Elkabetz is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow.io. His problem: How do you build a weather forecasting company from scratch? The company already sells weather intelligence to companies like JetBlue, Uber and the NFL. Their next move: Send the first private constellation of weather satellites to space (without running out of money). If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list . See omnystudio.com/listener for p...
Jul 07, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Emily Leproust is the co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience. Her problem: How do you store data in DNA -- and make it cheap enough to work in the real world. The cells in our bodies contain an incredible data storage system: DNA. Now, scientists have figured out how to use DNA as a digital storage device that is stable and incredibly compact. If you stored all the data on the Internet in DNA, it would fit in a shoebox. But there's a problem: It's still too expensive to work in the real world. O...
Jun 30, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Glenn Kelman is the CEO of the real estate company Redfin. His problem: With the housing market teetering, how do you sell houses online? Redfin has a website where you can look at houses for sale, just like Zillow. But Redfin also employs real estate agents all over the country to help people buy and sell houses. Recently, Redfin has started to buy houses and flip them for a profit and that new business is risky. "I'm worried about the economy," Glenn says. "I'm worried about the war in Ukraine...
Jun 23, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 14
This bonus episode is from Hot Money, a new podcast from Pushkin and the Financial Times. When Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson started digging into the porn industry, she made a shocking discovery: Nobody knew who controlled the biggest porn company in the world. Now, Nilsson and her editor, Alex Barker, have figured out who the guy was, and much more. In this episode, the fourth in the series, Patricia and Alex wonder how it's legal for porn sites to host millions of videos uploaded b...
Jun 21, 2022•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. His problem: How do you turn sending stuff into outer space into something that seems as boring and predictable as mailing a package? Later this month, one of the company's rockets will launch the NASA-funded Capstone mission to the moon. A mission to Venus is also in the works. And the company has already sent over 100 satellites into orbit. It's a conversation about space, but also about how technological change drives down prices -- and creates...
Jun 02, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 13
On this bonus episode of What’s Your Problem? Jacob Goldstein talks with Eddie Alterman, former editor of Car and Driver and host of the new podcast Car Show! In this episode, Eddie investigates the Lunar Rover. Why did we send a car to the moon? How did we design something for an environment we knew nothing about? Also: A look at the new lunar rover engineers are working on now. You can find more episodes of Car Show! with Eddie Alterman at https://link.chtbl.com/wypcarshow See omnystudio...
Jun 01, 2022•16 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX. His problem: How to spend billions of dollars to save humanity. Sam is one of the most interesting people in crypto -- in large part because he doesn't think crypto is the most interesting thing in the world. He got into the business because he wanted to make as much money as possible in order to give almost all of it away. He's now worth over $20 billion, and he's already donated hundreds of millions. In the next few years, he...
May 24, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Katherine Sizov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech. Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer. Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device. Next up: Avocados. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin po...
May 19, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Anna Katrina Shedletsky is co-founder and CEO of Instrumental. Her problem: How do you make electronics manufacturing more efficient and less wasteful? Anna started her career as a design engineer at Apple. It was her job to visit the factory when a new device was about to go into production and try to figure out all of the potential manufacturing problems that might arise. She realized this was an almost impossible task that relied on hope and luck -- and that it led to an incredibly inef...
May 12, 2022•25 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Today we're sharing a preview from another podcast we love, Slate Money. Every week, Felix Salmon of Axios is joined by Emily Peck, also of Axios, and Slate Pay Dirt columnist Elizabeth Spiers to chat about the latest in business and finance news. In this episode, Felix and Emily sit down with Alexandra Roberts, professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Peirce School of Law. They talk about everything trademarks, from social media to counterfeits and parodies. They also talk about tr...
May 10, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Reshma Shetty is co-founder and chief operations officer of Ginkgo Bioworks. Her problem: How do you turn cutting-edge science into a sustainable business? Ginkgo is a synthetic biology company. The idea is to make industrial products -- fragrances, or food, or whatever -- by genetically engineering DNA, sticking it into a yeast or bacteria, and getting the yeast or bacteria to produce the thing you want. Creating a profitable synthetic biology business is a really hard problem. But if it does w...
May 05, 2022•17 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet, a private company with a fleet of tiny satellites that takes photos of the entire Earth every day. Will’s problem: How do you turn all those images into useful data? In today’s episode we talk about shooting smartphones into space, turning a million-dollar antenna into a thousand-dollar paperclip, and how to count every tree in the Amazon. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, ...
Apr 28, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Joy and Raft Hollingsworth run The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company. Their problem: How do you help more Black people get into the legal weed industry? They faced this problem from the very beginning as they tried to start a marijuana farm from scratch in rural Washington. The Hollingsworths lived their entire lives in downtown Seattle and didn’t know anything about farming. It's a story that includes a paper bag full of cash, dinner with Anthony Bourdain, and hundreds of millions of dollars in we...
Apr 20, 2022•17 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Noubar Afeyan is the co-founder of Moderna and the founder of Flagship Pioneering. His problem: How do you turn the chaotic hero's journey of entrepreneurship into a repeatable, systematic process? Noubar created Flagship Pioneering to solve the problems he saw with entrepreneurship. Flagship's mission: To create new companies in a systematic, repeatable way. On today's show, Noubar explains how that system led to the creation of Moderna, a company that developed a COVID vaccine and saved millio...
Apr 14, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Rafael Ilishayev is the co-founder of the instant delivery company Gopuff. His problem: How do you deliver everything from bananas to hot coffee in around 30 minutes -- and still make a profit? On today's show, Jacob Goldstein surprises Rafael with a live Gopuff order. And they discuss the problems the company is working on in real time as they wait to see if the order will arrive on time and in good shape. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts b...
Apr 07, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Luis von Ahn is the founder and CEO of the language app DuoLingo. His problem: How do you teach people to speak a language -- really speak it -- using only an iPhone app? On the surface, DuoLingo looks warm and fuzzy. Underneath the hood, it's a serious tech company built on artificial intelligence. But the best machine learning in the world still isn't good enough to really teach people how to fluently speak in a new language. Luis is trying to change that. If you’d like to keep up with the mos...
Mar 31, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Aicha Evans is the CEO of Zoox. Her problem: Designing a car that knows what to do when it pulls up to a 4-way stop. AI is transforming the way cars work. But AI still struggles with predicting the behavior of human drivers. To build a car that can truly drive itself, Aicha and the rest of the industry will have to solve this problem. How do you teach self-driving cars to understand people? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscri...
Mar 24, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Keenan Wyrobek is the co-founder of Zipline. His problem: How do you fill the skies with delivery drones and keep them from crashing into each other? Zipline’s drones already make hundreds of deliveries a day in Ghana and Rwanda. But to expand to the U.S. he has to solve a fundamental problem. Americans’ love of freedom and the open skies makes it hard to build a drone business here. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to o...
Mar 17, 2022•21 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Ramon van Meer is the CEO of Alpha Paw. His problem: How do you grow a niche business (ramps for weiner dogs!) when a pandemic blows up your supply chain and Apple ruins your targeted ads? Ramon has sold over $30 million worth of dog ramps. That’s a lot of dog ramps. But in order to do so he has to deal with some of the biggest companies on earth. On today’s show, we talk about how he has built his company on top of the tech giants – and how they threaten his very existence. If you’d like to kee...
Mar 17, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks to entrepreneurs and engineers about how they'll change the world -- once they solve a few problems. Coming March 17th. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Feb 07, 2022•2 min
